Forum:Help with an abuse filter?
Hi, I'm an admin on the Some Ordinary Gamers wiki, a creepypasta wiki. Over the past couple months, we have been dealing with a chronic spammer with a proxy who has been incessantly socking in order to upload spam pages. In response we created an abuse filter that prevented page creation by non-AC (new) users. The filter worked for a little while until the spammer figured out that it did not prevent non-AC users from editing pages and turned to vandalism instead. His attacks have slowed down and we have managed to control the damage he does pretty well recently, but just having the filter up has been a major detriment to our wiki. We have had a significant drop in traffic due to it and the community has suffered a drain in energy and enthusiams. In effect the spammer seems to be winning by making the wiki a less fun place for everyone. I have an idea for an abuse filter with a rather specific set of conditions that I believe should frustrate the spammer enough to force him to move on to greener pastures and continue to help us fight spam and vandalism even after he is gone. But I don't know how to program it. I was wondering if you guys could make such a filter for us if we told you the conditions or hook us up with someone who can. Thanks RepublicofE (talk) http://someordinarygamers.wikia.com/wiki/SomeOrdinaryGamers_Wiki :Hey, you could post the conditions here or try the vstf wiki~UltimateSupreme 07:17, May 10, 2014 (UTC) : Hello, I am an admin at Creepypasta Wiki and we have been dealing with the same spammer you have. I also have a lot of experience when it comes to working with the abuse filter extension. I can help you to make a filter as long as you post the conditions you want. Lil' Miss Rarity [w:c:devOpen Source[]] (talk) 17:38, May 10, 2014 (UTC) : Alright, here are the conditions I had in mind: : 1. Non-AC users=users who have created an account less than four days before their first attempted edit. : 2. Prevent non-AC users from creating more than five pages within a 12 hour period. : 3. Prevent non-AC users from making more than, say, 25 edits within an hour. : 4. Prevent photo or video creation or removal by non-AC users. : 5. Prevent the publication of pages with empty placeholders and/or extra section headings. : 6. Prevent the creation of pages with less than a certain amount of text (say, less than 100 bytes or less than 250 characters, something like that). Also prevent creation of pages that have more than 25 of one character in a row, or that do not contain any vowels, or do not contain any constanents. : 7. Prevent creation of pages with titles that are all constanents or all vowels, or have no capital letters, or have "X" immediatly followed by "D" anywhere in the title, or that have more than five numbers or punctuation marks or special characters, or that contain racial slurs or various profanities. : 8. Prevent non-AC users from removing more than, say, 500 bytes from any page at a time (or maybe just prevent non-AC users from editing pages that they haven't created, if that's possible). : 9. Prevent the creation of pages whose text is identical to any pages that have been deleted or any pages that actually exist, regardless of the title. : 10. Prevent account creation by non-AC users with usernames that are all constanents or all vowels, or contain any of several blacklisted words, including "proxy", "bot", "site", "euphoria", "god", "troll", "vandal", "spam", "epic", "bomb", "admin", "wiki" various profanities and racial slurs, major words that appear in the usernames of our admins, as well as any usernames that contain "X" immediatly followed by "D" : 11. Prevent non-AC users from editing other users' user pages other than their message walls (and even then prevent them from closing threads). : 12. Prevent non-registered users (IP addresses aka "A wikia contributor) from creating or editing pages other than to comment. : 13. Allow admins to manually confirm users. : 14. Filter can be deactivated or reactivated at any time, any number of times, and has no auto-shutoff feature. : 15. Filter conditions are hidden from users who are not admins. : RepublicofE (talk) :: This is going to be tricky for a number of reasons. # This is going to require a system of multiple filters to achieve. # This is accomplished by a filters rate limit. # You can limit actions based on namespace (we had something like this for awhile for images). # A lot of these are going to require large built in lists that have a high potential for false positives. # The AbuseFilter cannot prevent account creation. # Admins are not allowed to add autoconfirm users. However, you can ask staff to add a confirmed right to your wiki that can be added as an exception to the filters. # This is accomplished by changing the filter setting :: Lil' Miss Rarity [w:c:devOpen Source[]] (talk) 12:58, May 12, 2014 (UTC) I can't help with this right now, but I had abusefilter enabled on my test wiki a while back. If you want somewhere to try them out without disrupting an active wiki, I'd be happy to give you sysop rights there. I also have access to the private bad language filters on runescape wiki. They've been used for a number of years there and would be handy to use as a starting point for the title filters. Some of the title filters can also be handled by the title blacklist which is much simpler to use and maintain. So which of these conditions would be the most practical to implement, rarity? RepublicofE (talk) :To go through some of the flawed ideas in order :1. This sounds like you trying to prevent non-ac users from editing until 4 days after they create their account. Whilst this seems extreme to me, it also ignores that accounts become ac after 4 days so it seems a bit pointless to me. :4. Abuse filters and videos are slightly incompatible. You can prevent them from being added to a page, but uploading them might be a bit harder to stop. I know inserting videos through youtube tags, which are subsequently converted to file links is impossible to prevent via abuse filter. :7. This one isn't flawed afaik. The abuse filter docs say createaccount is supported as an action, so this should be fine unless LMR has had some problems with it in the past? :: It looks like wikia use an older version of abusefilter. You can block any action made by a user that matches an account name though, if that'll suffice? This one does work: abusefilter - log entry :11. Closing threads might be a little tricky to do, but you can remove the button with css if you like. It'll still be there, but it'll be harder to use. I can also unbind the events for non-ac users too. :LMR has addressed the points about admins confirming accounts. Blocking new users from editing/creating pages should be done through staff really as abuse filters aren't how this should be done. :I will say some of the filters seem a bit extreme, especially given the activity of the wiki. Adding such restrictions to new users might put them off in the long run. I've found it better to restrict the bad edits rather than have a blanket restriction on the user group. ::Filters for 2 and 3 ::Filter for large removal. Adjust the delta as needed--''~UltimateSupreme'' 10:12, May 15, 2014 (UTC) ::Thanks a lot. I'll see about exporting these to our wiki once I figure out how to deactivate our current filter.